This invention relates generally to digital video, and more particularly to automatic editing of digital video.
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document may contain material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The following notice applies to the software and data as described below and in the drawings hereto: Copyright (copyright)1999, Sony Electronics, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
Although many consumers take videos of their family vacations, parties and other events, these videos are frequently un-watchable. Common problems include jerkiness, too much time spent on one image, too rapid panning, out-of-focus frames, and poor viewpoints, among other. While video editing software exists for home computers, most demand too much knowledge and interaction by the amateur video photographer to be regularly used.
An automatic video editing system identifies a problem in a video frame in an input video and edits the video frame according to a set of editing parameters. While the automatic video editing system can process input video without any input from the user, the user may input values for the editing parameters that override default values. In one aspect, the resulting output video is displayed to the user and the user can elect to have certain frames from the input video restored, unedited, to the output video. In another aspect, the video frames with problems are classified into categories based on the problem identified and the editing parameters are applied to the frames by category. Because the automatic video editing system requires no user input, there is no need for the user to learn complicated video editing commands nor does the user have to constantly interact with the system.